Never Mind Humanity

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Ray Kurzweil, Viking, 352 pages

One might think that if someone ever figured out how to create a mind—if the secret of human thought were ever revealed—explaining it would take more than a normal-sized book. But such is the promise of Ray Kurzweil’s new volume, which tackles the most perplexing riddle in the history of scientific investigation in a mere 282 pages (plus endnotes). The book might be dismissed on the bluster of its title alone, were it not the latest work from the famed futurist, inventor, and artificial-intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil, who was hired as a director of engineering at Google the month after the book’s release.

Kurzweil’s theory begins with the premise that the basic function of the mammalian brain is pattern recognition. Backed by scattered empirical evidence, he suggests that neurons are bunched into small groups, each of which can recognize very simple patterns in raw information from the senses. With hundreds of millions of these units working in concert, a simple, uniform learning method can build up to progressively more complex features and so tackle complicated cognitive tasks. Like our own perception, Kurzweil’s system is sensitive to context: for instance, it is more likely to recognize a smudged character as an “E” when it is preceded by the characters “appl” than by “banan.”

In contrast, early AI research began by assuming that the mind is inherently formal and computer-like, even in its most immediate manifestations—for example, that our perceptions strictly precede our interpretations of them because our eyes are like video cameras. Cognitive scientists have only recently begun to reverse this view, documenting the ways that our perceptions are intertwined with our interpretations of them, as in the apple/banana example. Although Kurzweil still views cognition as ultimately reducible to computation, his insistence on starting from intuitions about the mind itself, rather than about computers, is a welcome corrective to many of the dogmas of early AI.

The argument, however, is weakened by its exposition, which inadvertently demonstrates Kurzweil’s claim that simple ideas can come across as much more complicated than they really are. Kurzweil describes the formulas behind his ideas mainly through text and poorly labeled diagrams, avoiding almost any math, which is surely safe to use when accompanied by proper verbal explanations. Because the book tries to split the difference between lay readers and those who are already somewhat versed in AI, it leaves many question marks for both.

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That much of the latter half of the book is little more than a quick-and-dirty rehash of his earlier work does not help. Kurzweil’s monograph on thought seems curiously thoughtless in places, and the prose is sprinkled with odd, flat sentences that ape the “Deep Thoughts” segments from “Saturday Night Live” of yore: “A common aphorism is, ‘You are what you eat.’ It is even more true to say, ‘You are what you think’.” “If you haven’t actually experienced ecstatic love personally, you have undoubtedly heard about it.” “The neocortex is a great metaphor machine, which accounts for why we are a uniquely creative species.” Later, immediately after reciting the dictionary definition of “metaphor,” Kurzweil abruptly asks, “Do you see any metaphors in Sonnet 73 by Shakespeare?”, then reproduces the sonnet. (In case you were wondering, yes, the sonnet does turn out to have some metaphors.)

The sophomoric attempts to describe metaphor point to the ultimate failings of what Kurzweil describes as his unified theory of mind—a theory whose power of explanation he repeatedly compares to those of Darwin and Einstein. He gives no account, for example, of a basic feature of perception, described elegantly by Emily Dickinson in a poem Kurzweil makes the opening epigraph to the book but does not seem to have fully thought through: “The Brain—is wider than the Sky— / For—put them side by side— / The one the other will contain … ” Perceptions do not simply categorize the world, as Kurzweil suggests, but experientially grasp it. But disembodied information, no matter how sophisticated, is not enough to create this experience—which is why computers today are no more capable of grasping the world than inert books or scrolls have been for the past three millennia.

Kurzweil simply waves this concern aside, arguing that qualities like these are “emergent properties” of the brain, and so will presumably arise from an emulation of human thought. The trouble is that, like mathematics, all of computation is already a way of formalizing and thus mimicking portions of thought, but that is not enough to allow computers to feel themselves thinking those thoughts. Perhaps Kurzweil’s system, which mimics a different portion of human thought, will somehow change this—but he offers no argument for why it will. His descriptions of his system as “symbolic” and “metaphorical” depend on the very leap his theory needs to explain: how does the brain move from being merely a piece of matter in the world, extending the organism’s ability to behave there in sophisticated ways, to a piece of matter that contains the world—or at least has the sense that it does?

The fact that Kurzweil ignores or even denies the great mystery of consciousness may help explain why his theory has yet to create a mind. In truth, despite the revelatory suggestion of the book’s title, his theory is only a minor variation on ideas that date back decades, to when Kurzweil used them to build text-recognition systems. And while these techniques have produced many remarkable results in specialized artificial-intelligence tasks, they have yet to create generalized intelligence or creativity, much less sentience or first-person awareness.

Perhaps owing to this failure, Kurzweil spends much of the book suggesting that the features of consciousness he cannot explain—the qualities of the senses and the rest of our felt life and their role in deliberate thought and action—are mostly irrelevant to human cognition. Of course, Kurzweil is only the latest in a long line of theorists whose attempts to describe and replicate human cognition have sidelined the role of first-person awareness, subjective motivations, willful action, creativity, and other aspects of how we actually experience our lives and our decisions.

Yet the kicker is that Kurzweil’s ultimate goal is to apply his theory not simply to creating intelligent machines but to our own minds, bringing them within the purview of computer engineers. The very world of feeling and experience that Kurzweil suggests has little relevance to understanding why we humans are the way we are is the same world he promises to deliver to us in ways faster, deeper, stronger, more vibrant, and more intense and mind-blowing than we can possibly imagine. In a series of books, lectures, and websites that have formed a sort of global Kurzweil brand, he has spelled out his vision of a future in which advances in biotechnology expand our lifespans indefinitely while neural implants enhance our cognitive abilities and gradually replace our meat-based brains.

With computers manipulating our neurons, he argues, we can experience anything we imagine. For instance, Kurzweil writes in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology of the possibilities of virtual sex, in which you could download a program to instruct “nanobots in and around your nervous system [to] generate the appropriate signals for all of your senses: visual, auditory, tactile of course, even olfactory,” stimulating your nervous system into feeling a complete sensory experience as if you were having sex with your favorite celebrity or any other object of your desire. What’s love got to do with it?

Perhaps because Kurzweil sees fantasies like these as the greatest objects of our aspiration, it is not surprising to find in How to Create a Mind that his descriptions of the human nature he seeks to perfect seem so passionless and dreary. Despite paying lip service to artistic depictions of love and other elevated experiences, he refers to attraction as a “program,” says that love “exists to meet the [evolutionary] needs of the neocortex,” and explains the accompanying experiences of euphoria and yearning as “account[ed] for” by “high levels of dopamine and norepinephrine.” His descriptions of creativity and spirituality are even less inspiriting than this.

This very paltriness is the real secret of Kurzweil’s theory, which promises to create a mind without really having to describe what it is like to have one. Perhaps the most important feature of human thought missing from Kurzweil’s theory is language. Describing it as but a useful “invention,” he gives no account of language’s distinctive role in human cognition—not simply in communicating our experiences and perceptions but in fundamentally shaping them, even constituting them.

Rather than flowing from some grand reflection about human nature, Kurzweil’s project begins from a conception of that nature whittled down to near nothing. Even for poets, words are always finally inadequate to our depths. Yet engineers whose views of human nature are the shallowest have anointed themselves as designers of the next stage in human evolution.

All of this might amount to nothing were it not for the fact that Kurzweil cannot be dismissed as a crank. Building on his previous AI innovations, he has a large audience for his prophecies, including prominent figures in industry and academia. In the end, these followers of “transhumanism” might just figure out how to pull off some of their goals. What some critics fear about this effort by Kurzweil and others to reengineer our bodies and minds is that, plagued by unintended consequences, the results could turn out quite other than predicted. Indeed—but should we be any more comforted by the possibility that the post-human nature they create might turn out just as they describe it?

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22 Responses to Never Mind Humanity

Ridiculing Ray Kurzweil is easy. Kurzweil, Singularity-advocates, transhumanists, anti-aging proponents and the like are attacked, mocked, and sneered at by both left and right.

The liberal left hates people like Kurzweil because they’re deeply suspicious of technology. Environmentalism has become so central to left ideology that any innovative invention is treated as guilty until proven innocent of despoiling the planet. Moreover, transhumanism is a non-starter for most on the left since they’d rather that nobody’s mind be uploaded than suffer from the disparity of haves and have-nots that results from the introduction of any new technology.

The right, as exemplified by the anti-technology New Atlantis, hates Kurzweil because of social conservative concerns over vacuous ideals like the dignity and sanctity of life, which in this case mean that we shouldn’t enhance, expand, or extend our lives too much. Human life is so sacred we shouldn’t use our capacity to reason too much or improve our brief spans on this mortal coil to excess.

Really, only libertarians are prone to being receptive to men like Kurzweil. Yet as recently as circa 1960, when Americans still believed in the future and did not live in fear of Malthusian decline, commentators on both the left and right championed such men.

RS
When both the left and the right, almost everyone in fact, view such thinking as suspect, isn’there the possibility that it is indeed suspect?
I am on the left and I do not think that the dignity and sanctity of life are vacuous concepts. Hardly anyone does, even if there may be differences of opinion about the application of these concepts.

“Human life is so sacred we shouldn’t use our capacity to reason too much or improve our brief spans on this mortal coil to excess.”

And just what band of conservatives did you conjure up to contend such an idea. I have never met a conservative who harbored such thoughts.

Caution is a healthy perspective in any discussion of human engineering. And we social conservative are quite delighted that the value of human dignity is responsible for ending slavery and aother assorted assaults against human existence.

We are delighted your mother saw fit to ensure your birth, even if you are aren’t.

The size of one’s audience does not fail to make one a crank (see television). The NYRB review of the book was respectful but devistating.
The man is silly adn that some take him seriously is emrely an indication of the extent of silliness even in some very profitible places.

What band of conservatives? I suggest perusing the magazine which Mr. Shulman writes for. The New Atlantis is a conservative journal devoted to combating things like genetic engineering and regenerative medicine.

I’m speaking of the people that libertarian Ronald Bailey describes as bioconservatives such as bioethicist Leon Kass, for example. Kass was even opposed to in vitro fertilization when it was first introduced, but he’s relented since. He’s still against most genetic modification, anti-aging technology, stem cell research and the like.

These conservatives share the left’s antipathy towards advanced technology. Indeed most of society does today. Any major advance is assaulted by questions like: but why should we waste money on that when there’s children starving in Africa? Won’t that just lead to more inequality? Or who will be liable for accidents and what’s the regulatory framework? Or wouldn’t that be playing God? Or what if there are unforeseen effects on the environment? We should do more decade-long studies before proceeding, etc.

The precautionary principle is a hidden cause for the massive slowdown in growth rates in the developed world.

As a long time reader voracious reader of science fiction, these concepts are neither foreign or new. I reccommend Isaac Asimov to name an old school explorer into the melding of mind and siliocon chips.

The problem of consciousness, if a metaphor involving direction may be allowed, descends much deeper than human cognitive ability, I think. All the objections to Mr. Kurzweil’s infantile materialism, so ably set forth by Mr. Schulman, are present in every living creature, from bacillus to man, that interacts with its environment, which is to say, in all of them. Indeed, the problem of consciousness, I suggest, goes “all the way down,” as the saying has it, to the so-called elementary particles of nature.

In physics texts, papers, etc., it is common enough to read a sentence such as “an electron feels the electromagnetic field of a proton in the nucleus . . . .” Sometimes one finds “senses” or “reacts to” instead of “feels.” The wording is unimportant. Whatever words are chosen, it is insufficient, in my opinion, to explain such language as clumsy metaphors or similes. For the question immediately arises: “Metaphors or similes for what?”

That gravity should be innate inherent to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by & through which their action or force {may} be conveyed from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent [acting] constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to the consideration of my readers[emphasis added].

“[S]o great an absurdity”! That about sums it up. It is, properly considered, the exact same difficulty Mr. Schulman points out in Mr. Kurzweil’s work. Notice, nowhere does Newton use the word field” as in “gravitational field,” which we would employ to specify the source of the “agency” that Newton found so perplexing. The field concept was only to arrive about 150 years later in the epochal investigations of Michael Faraday into electrical and magnetic phenomena (c. 1830). The concept was revolutionary, and it does seem to answer to Newton’s predicament, the important word here being “seem,” I think.

Newton was a mechanist both as philosopher and as physicist, which, not to put too fine a point on it, means he conceived of material objects affecting one another via push me–pull you sorts of connections, as, for instance, through ropes, levers, pulleys, and the like. After all, the physics problems he dealt with in the 17th Century were wholly macroscopic; so he never needed to conform his mechanics to the microscopic realm of molecules, where there are no such things as ropes or pulleys, and yet, where objects somehow interact through the gauge fields, as we now classify them, of the Standard Model—except, that is, for gravity, which Newton knew perfectly well operated in a vacuum.

Engineers have calculated the sort of mechanical connection that would be needed to hold an object of the mass of the earth (approx. 10^22 tons) traveling at the speed that it does (68,000 mph) in its orbit without flying away tangentially, as say, when whirling a ball at the end of a rope. What is required, it turns out, is a cable of the strongest steel currently made that is the width of the earth’s diameter! The cable would also have to be 93 million miles long! Nothing punier will do to ensure a stable orbit; yet nothing at all connects the earth to the sun, supposedly, but a gravitational field, the theoretical carrier of which, the graviton, a massless boson, has yet to be detected. The same is true for the only current alternative, the gravity wave, which is unknown to experimental art.

Thus, the substitution of fields for ropes and pulleys has not really solved the problem of how one material body “senses” or “feels” another so much as it has rephrased it, and in doing so, the field concept actually complicates matters conceptually, for we no longer even have the simple push me–pull you visibility of a rope to guide our ideation. For that reason Faraday’s work—as well as Maxwell’s—a brilliant synthesis-cum-generalization of the former—truly was the death knell of newtonian mechanics.

Albert Einstein for one clearly saw the problem and how it related to his own work. In 1938, he and the physicist Leopold Infeld wrote a short book called The Evolution of Physics, which cannot be too highly recommended if one wishes to grasp what physics has been up to the past three or four centuries and where it is headed. The Evolution of Physics contains four chapters: “The Rise of The Mechanical View,” “The Decline of the Mechanical View,” “Field, Relativity,” and “Quanta.”

The problem of consciousness, it seems, does “go all the way down.” In that regard a plausible speculating of why a “turtle” was chosen in the ancient Indian cosmological parable might be that a turtle is an excellent descriptive symbol of awareness per se, namely, of consciousness, in that a turtle may or may not peek out from its shell to “know” its surroundings, but that it is there (cf., heideggerian Dasein, “human consciousness”) to do so is not lightly to be gainsaid. At the bottom of everything may lie something that can be likened to an apriori experience, which is to say, awareness antecedent to any empirical conditions, for which, as a matter of logic, there exist neither necessary nor sufficient conditions.

R.S.
I remember watching a documentary in 2000 that the singularity will be occur in 2010. Now it will occur in 2020 and then 2030 and so on. Lets get serious here Kurzweil is selling snake oil, he deserves to get mocked, I take those Ancient Alien shows more seriously than what Kurzweil is selling.

This is an example of hubris on Kurzweil’s part. Sometimes it is helpful to not know an area of knowledge if you are trying to expand it’s horizons, but if you do not understand the basic functions and interactions between subcomponents, you are opening yourself to ridicule.

Kurzweil’s theoretical brain posits a centrality of rational decision making in the CNS and his model lacks a neuromodulatory system . He has made no accomodation for the functions of such basic and indispensible structures as the midbrain and hindbrain.

Let him waste several years and millions of google dollars before someone hands him his walking papers.

The problem of consciousness, if a metaphor involving direction may be allowed, descends much deeper than human cognitive ability. All the objections to Mr. Kurzweil’s infantile materialism, so ably set forth by Mr. Schulman, are present in every living creature from bacillus to man that interacts with its environment, which is to say, in all of them. Indeed, the problem of consciousness, I suggest, like the famous turtles, goes “all the way down” to the so-called elementary particles of nature.

In physics texts, papers, etc., it is common enough to read a sentence such as “an electron feels the electromagnetic field of a proton in the nucleus . . . .” Sometimes one finds “senses” or “reacts to” instead of “feels.” The wording is unimportant. Whatever words are chosen, it is insufficient, in my opinion, to explain such language as clumsy metaphors or similes. For the question immediately arises: “Metaphors or similes for what?”

That gravity should be innate inherent to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by & through which their action or force [may] be conveyed from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I beleive no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent [acting] constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to the consideration of my readers [emphasis added].

“[S]o great an absurdity” about sums it up. It is, properly considered, the exact same difficulty Mr. Schulman points out in Mr. Kurzweil’s work. Notice, nowhere does Newton use the word field, as in “gravitational field,” which we would employ to specify the location of the “agency” that Newton found so perplexing. The field concept was only to arrive about 150 years later in the epochal investigations of Michael Faraday into electrical and magnetic phenomena (c. 1830). The concept was revolutionary, and it does seem to answer to Newton’s predicament; the important word here being “seem,” I think.

Newton was a mechanist both as philosopher and as physicist, which, not to put too fine a point on it, means he conceived of material objects affecting one another via push me–pull you sorts of connections, as, for instance, through ropes, levers, pulleys, and the like. After all, the physics problems he dealt with in the 17th Century were wholly macroscopic, so he never needed to conform his mechanics to the microscopic realm of molecules where there are no such things as ropes or pulleys, and yet, where objects also somehow interact—through the gauge fields, as we now classify them, of the Standard Model—except, that is, for gravity, which Newton knew perfectly well operated in a vacuum. He settled for something called action at a distance, and was quite grumpy about it.

Engineers with time on their hands have calculated the sort of mechanical connection needed to hold in orbit an object of the mass of the earth (approx. 10^22 tons) traveling at the speed that it does (68,000 mph) without flying away tangentially, as happens, say, when whirling a ball at the end of a rope and the rope breaks. What is required, it turns out, is a cable forged from the strongest steel currently made that is the width of the earth’s diameter! The cable would also have to be 93 million miles long. Nothing punier will do to ensure a stable orbit; yet nothing at all connects the earth to the sun, supposedly, but a gravitational field, the theoretical carrier of which, the graviton, a massless boson, has yet to be detected. The same is true for the only current alternative, the gravity wave, which is unknown to experimental art.

Thus, the substitution of fields for ropes and pulleys has not really solved the problem of how one material body “senses” or “feels” another so much as it has rephrased it, and in doing so, the field concept actually complicates matters conceptually, for we no longer even have the simple push me–pull you visibility of a rope to guide our ideation. For that reason Faraday’s work—as well as Maxwell’s—a brilliant synthesis-cum-generalization of the former—truly was the death knell of newtonian mechanics.

Albert Einstein for one clearly saw the problem and how it related to his own work. In 1938, he and the physicist Leopold Infeld wrote a short book titled The Evolution of Physics, which cannot be too highly recommended if one wishes to grasp what physics has been up to the past three or four centuries and where it is headed. The Evolution of Physics contains four chapters: “The Rise of The Mechanical View,” “The Decline of the Mechanical View,” “Field, Relativity,” and “Quanta.”

The problem of consciousness, it seems, does “go all the way down.” In that regard a plausible speculation as to why a “turtle” was chosen in the ancient Indian cosmological parable might be that a turtle is an excellent descriptive symbol of awareness per se, namely, of pure consciousness, in that a turtle may or may not peek out from its shell to “know” its surroundings, but that it is there (cf., heideggerian Dasein, “human consciousness”) to do so is not lightly to be gainsaid. At the bottom of everything may lie something that can be likened to an apriori experience, which is to say, awareness antecedent to any empirical requirements; for which, as a matter of logic, there exist neither necessary nor sufficient conditions.

I’m basically a Whiteheadian panexperientialist, so I more or less agree with what you wrote. I have no problem with saying things like, “The electron felt the proton” or “The electric eye in the elevator felt the person in the doorway.” I agree with Strawson that materialism more or less entails panexperientialism—if you think human minds are made by physical objects, that only makes sense if you also believe all physical objects have (simpler, less sophisticated) minds that compound into human minds.

Bu when you write really long, long, long comments like that, it makes you look crazy. Keep it short! 😉

I’m curious if the reviewer is offering anything more than a standard Searlean response to AI? Why does it feel to me that nothing in this discussion has changed in at least 20 years – its actually weird. The only twist I can add is that Google seems to have developed the model that “Do be evil” as of late…

“. . . . if you think human minds are made by physical objects, that only makes sense if you also believe all physical objects have (simpler, less sophisticated) minds that compound into human minds.”

Aptly said. Yet, as I have come to understand, a good deal of the problem with accepting or even understanding what you refer to as “Whiteheadian panexperientialism,” but which I have always called Panpsychism, is the tendency to conflate consciousness with mind. Consciousness transcends mind. It occupies a noumenal status in kantian terms, whereas, it seems to me, “mind” is at least epiphenomenal. If as you point out, more advanced minds are “compounds” of less advanced minds, then mind would seem to have a structure, which I agree it does. But then, to my way of thinking, granting such compounding, we haven’t advanced much from Kurzweil’s position of emergent properties—a question-begging “solution,” if there ever was one, I wonder if you agree—and are back to Schulman’s most telling objection, namely, if “disembodied information, no matter how sophisticated, is not enough to create this experience” how is a more elementary information system such as a quark to do this?

It is the reality of experience per se, not this experience or that experience, whether sophisticated or humble, that is the stumbling block. Zaniness such as Kurzweil’s simply obscures the problem in a plethora of algorithms and the like, giving the illusion of understanding consciousness when in fact one has radically misunderstood it. there can be no structure to consciousness, in my opinion. If you think there is and decide that you know what it is, you are still at the level of mind and must descend a turtle lower. That is what I meant by consciousness or awareness being “an apriori experience.” It just is and, like the cosmos as a whole, there are no necessary or sufficient conditions to account for it.

Well, I’ve gone on and on again. I really don’t much care if I seem “crazy” to somebody or even everybody. If my comments are long, well, there’s always the scroll bar handy. Feel free to use it.

The telling part of this article is the last paragraph, where the author tells us he is worried that Kurzweil is right.

Three other interesting people working on similar problems to Kurzweil: Douglas Hofstadter (writes about the sense of “I” we experience), Ben Goertzel (scientist who philosophizes about thought as pattern recognition), and Hugo de Garis (scientist who made the creepy prediction of an artilect war at the end of the century).

I prefer “panexperientialism” to “panpsychism” because “panpsychicism” makes it sound like rocks have a human-like interior life. I believe rocks have an interior life, but it’s so basic and non-symbolic that it’s highly misleading to be overly anthropomorphic about it.

One trouble with debates about the nature of mind is that too many people just throw their hands up and say that consciousness is “undefinable.” OK, maybe, but could you at least give us an answer key to let us know what part of thinking you’re talking about? There are a lot of varieties of thought, and they need different names. Here’s my loose key:

– Experience: I use this term for anything that “knows” (in the loosest sense) about anything else. A rock “knows” where the ground is, an electron “knows” where the proton is, a plant “knows” that it is sunny today. I believe that all real entities have experience.

– Awareness: I use this term for not just “knowing” about something else, but “knowing that one knows.” Many animals have a basic form of awareness, but plants do not. Awareness comes about when experiences compound themselves into more complicated forms.

– Symbolic Consciousness: This is what humans have that other animals don’t. We aren’t just aware of things, we have symbols for them (words, concepts) that we manipulate internally in thought and externally in language.

Berkeley said that “to be is to be perceived.” He was wrong, but not far off base. “To be is to be a cause.” (The Buddhist logicians also taught this.) On the flip side, “to perceive is to be caused.”

Any time we talk about A causing a change in B, we may also describe it as B’s having “perceived” A. With that in mind, it makes sense to say that the rock “perceives” the ground, etc. Once you accept this view of things, it follows that virtually everything has “experience” in the minimal sense.

Causation and perception are just two sides of the same thing. From the inside, we call it perception. From the outside, we call it causation. That’s why it’s so hard to prove that anyone has perception besides oneself (the problem of solipsism). As long as one is outside of the other, one can only talk about it as a being that causes things. It is only from the position of the other that one can say “what it is like” to be a thing, in which case the causation is felt internally.

I admit that my philosophical system sketched here is only speculative. I can’t prove that it’s an accurate picture of the world. But I think that adopting a system like mine makes it at least in principle possible to find solutions to otherwise insolvable problems like the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, the nature of being, and so forth.

It is ironic that to arrive at this impasse ,Kurzweil, though unaware of de Chardin’s work ,had first to independently arrive at something very much resembling the ‘omega point’, which he rechristened ‘ the singularity’ in his pervious book.

“I believe rocks have an interior life, but it’s so basic and non-symbolic that it’s highly misleading to be overly anthropomorphic about it.”

You later add:

“There are a lot of varieties of thought, and they need different names.”

There are lots of varieties of thought, but I suggest to you that—insofar as it is thinking we are describing, not perceiving or feeling— they all have one thing in common and that thing is the recognition of similarity. It does not require a very advanced cognitive apparatus to recognize similarities between one thing and another. Animals, even primitive creatures, seem to manage it effortlessly. Of course asserting that one experience is similar to another does indicate quite advanced cognitive skill. You would call that “symbolic consciousness,” I believe; but if one is to get at the mental state of, say, an electron, it is unnecessarily harsh to deny cognition to it because it cannot remember its eighth-grade graduation or first kiss. An electron can earn an A in thinking well short of that.

I am a physicist by training, so I understand that one of the great advances in physical understanding appeared around the middle of the 19th Century: the notion of conservation, as deployed, for example, in the “conservation of energy,” the “conservation of momentum,” and so forth. The great utility of such theorems is that given the initial conditions of a physical system, out of all the possible paths of physical evolution it could follow, the only path the system will follow are those in which its initial and final energies are equal and its initial and final momenta are equal and several other equalities might be mentioned as well (by the way, and quite importantly, the sense of “and” there is “and logical”). So the critical criteria of physics for 150 years turn out to be measures of equality. That is of course no accident. The paths selected are solutions to differential equations of one sort or another.

One of the great discoveries of modern physics, by which I mean quantum theory, is that equalities do not seem to apply. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for instance, is a criterion of inequality. The behavior of an electron in an atom, granting reality to such things for a moment, is certainly not governed solely by the criterion of equality. An infinite number of equal-energy states apparently are unavailable to the electron, because its evolution is energetically quantized. What I am suggesting is that the electron will evolve from one state only to another that is sufficiently similar to the first. Mathematically there are several ways to make such an assertion rigorous and falsifiable. The similarity could, for example, be of the nature of an isomorphism between categories, a functor, but as to which there isn’t time or space sufficient to go into here. (If you’re curious you might go to Amazon and use their “Look Inside This Book” app to browse the last quarter of a book called The Body of Myth (ITI, 1994), written by yours truly. It’s shameless self-promotion, I agree, so please feel no obligation at all to actually do that.)

The point to all of that, is that perhaps the way forward in physics is to abandoned a physics based on conservation laws demanding equality of this or that parameter with conservation laws of another sort: a sytem will evolve from point A to point B in its phase space if and only if B is sufficiently similar to A. An interesting property of similarities is that, unlike equalities, they do not in general necessarily require commutative operations to describe their evolution. Beginning, for example, with a circle (topological) similarity to an ellipse of small eccentricity may be recognized, though there is not, for that reason, any necessity that the reverse similarity, ellipse to circle, be recognized by the system. The third state could be another ellipse of greater eccentricity. One of the unavoidable rquirements of quantum theory seem to be non-Abelian algebras, involving noncommuting dynamical variables.

In sum, the physics that we have heretofore practiced is the physics of perception. It is a science of what can be seen with the eye and balanced with the hand. In such a physics equality must dominate. The principle is as old as Book I of The Elements of Euclid (c. 3rd cent. BC), found in his proofs of congruence, in which objects are adjudged equal or unequal by whether or not they fit one over the other and vice versa without discrepancy. Congruence is equality in the guise of geometry, the mathematics that dominated western science for the first 1800 years or so after Archimedes (algebra being greatly distrusted by the Greeks, supposedly because of Pythagoras’ discovery of irrational numbers). Of course in the same work, Euclid spends a great deal of time on theorems of similarity, to which more attention could have been paid in our science but wasn’t. A physics of similitude would be a cognitive physics. We lack such a physics; or possibly we’ve already begun to acquire one but have yet to realize it.

“. . . we have symbols for [things] that we manipulate internally in thought and externally in language.”

The words “internally” and “externally” stand out. Does not their use, if taken litearally, mean that one has already surrendered the field, as it were, to perception? I mean to say that it is only via perception that “inside” and “outside” are experienced as fact rather than fiction. I am in a room. That means something perceptually and, I’d argue, only perceptually. Their knowledge is a result of our visual ability.

On the other hand imagination is primarily a cognitive capabilility. I may easily imagine a box and a ball within it. But let’s be candid. Is the imaginary ball actually inside the imaginary box or the box actually outside the ball? I may imagine a one-foot ruler. Is it a foot long? Measures such as being “inside” or being “a foot long” are measures of equality of one form or another. They will not serve for describing literal imperceptibles such as atoms or electrons. Historically, the attempt to apply them uncritically at all scales has led to paradox. It should surprise no one. Neils Bohr himself, a founder of quantum mechanics, warned us long ago against the folly of projecting parameters of perception, chiefly space and time, into the reality of an atom that no man has ever seen.

“Any time we talk about A causing a change in B, we may also describe it as B’s having ‘perceived’ A.”

A truly brilliant innovation! Though I wonder a bit about the antecedents of “it.”

“. . . virtually everything has ‘experience’ in the minimal sense.”

Yes, so long, I’d insist, as “minimal” can be understood as including primitive cognitions of the kind sketched above. Moreover, neither perception nor cognition are comprehensive. You probably won’t like this, but I think we must grant to rocks and electrons elementary feeling states called proprioceptions if we are to make sense of the grand mother “feeling” of them all: gravity. But that must be for another day.

I used to read a lot of science fiction, until my interest in the genre tapered off. A few years ago, I dipped back into it. It felt like every other story I read was about The Singlarity!! or Panhumanism!!!

The exclamation points are my way of expressing how overheated these claims seemed, from the perspective of someone who had checked out of the genre when these ideas caught fire. I understand the ideas, but paint me a skeptic. As others in this thread have said, you have to jump a very wide, very deep canyon of ignorance about consciousness and intelligence to get to the other side, where people are convinced that super-intelligent AIs are coming by 2030. (A specific date? Really?)

“Why does it feel to me that nothing in this discussion has changed in at least 20 years – its actually weird.”

Artificial Intelligence research, the real kind, not Kurzweil’s crankish variety, hasn’t made any headway on autonomous thinking machines since the 80s. All of the development (and money) has been in collective intelligence and statistical predictive systems, the sort of math that allows people to make billions trading stocks a thousand times a second, and allows advertisers to read your mind and get you to do their market research for them.

Since Kurzweil was there at the very beginning, he’s well situated to stretch his very old ideas on to this new frame, and that suits him just fine. I don’t think he’s a “crank,” but he’s best understood as a sort of Court Soothsayer for Internet billionaires.

He essentially remixes warmed-over soft sci-fi, Blue Box-era hacker ethos, and tech futurism from the 80s, the sort of thing that marinaded tech entrepreneurs’ brains in college, and dresses it up with more modern concepts and provides a flattering progressivist gloss. His product leaves most intelligent, skeptical readers cold but flatters his rich patrons and permits them to believe their work actually has a revolutionary, culturally-tranformative, moral mission — as opposed to just being mere commerce, a slightly more efficient way of selling books or toothpaste.

Kurzweil’s ideas are little more than Stuff Rich People Pay to Hear. In 100 years it will be on the library shelf beside Ayn Rand and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Two documentaries get his number pretty well; first The Transcendent Man, which exposes his pathological beliefs about immortality, and Plug & Pray, which deconstructs his ideological technologism.

“[Kurzweil] essentially remixes warmed-over soft sci-fi, Blue Box-era hacker ethos, and tech futurism from the 80s, the sort of thing that marinaded tech entrepreneurs’ brains in college, and dresses it up with more modern concepts and provides a flattering progressivist gloss.”

A wonderfully precise summary, thank you. I’ve never read the man, but from what you write he reminds me of John Negroponte and the MIT MediaLab cultists.